The War - Ken Burns Series on PBS

[KilgoreTrout]

Ken Burn's The War airs starting Sunday night on PBS.

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I find the Second World War fascinating and generally like the way Burns tells a story. He can be pretentious at times but I'll be glued to the TV for this one.

[Dominic]

i'll definitely be watching this

[diebitter]

I'll watch it for sure if it gets to the UK.

You guys ever get the British documentary series 'The World At War'?

It's really great. I've toyed with doing an ep by ep discussion thread, but doubt it'll get any interest.

[KilgoreTrout]

DB - PBS usually licenses its programs to the BBC (typically after they air in the US).

[Blarg]

Thanks for the heads up, I might start checking this out, especially if someone bumps this on Sunday.

I'm a bit burnt out on WW2 though. I've always thought WW1 was just as interesting, and there are lots more wars out there. I'm ready to see some war treated besides WW2 for a change.

[diebitter]

Blarg

There an old (60s) series by the BBC called 'The Great War' that's pretty good. Sure, it's old, but it does contain interviews with vets.

[KilgoreTrout]

My beef with WWII documentaries is that none of them tells the whole story that ties the roots of WWII to today's conflicts. Even Wold at War starts with the Battle of the Atlantic, IIRC.

To wit: the British and American deal to grant Iraq the appearance of independence in the late 1930's while retaining control of Iraqi oil production that lead to a failed coup in Iraq and armed conflict. Colonialism may not be as dead as we think.

Little is said in most WW2 documentaries of the Stalin/Hitler prewar agreements vis the partitioning of Poland and Finland or the whacky German strawman attacks said to have been conducted by Poland that Hitler used as a premise. And the series of wars between the Russians and Japanese in the early 20th century, fought over warm water ports and colonial ambitions, planted the seeds for the Sino-Japanese war that led to the outbreak of widespread war in the Pacific theater in 1937 - the start of WW2.

WWII converted US production into a war machine. Recall Eisenhower's farewell address. He cautioned against a sustained "military-industrial complex" and its ambitions. Haliburton, Blackwater, Raytheon, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush are all precisely what Ike told us to watch out for.

We could very well be on the precipice of another global conflict. There are many similarities between Ahrmadinejad and Hitler. Iran even has a fuhrer: Ayatollah Khamenei.

All this stuff interests me, but by far the concept of Total War is the most fascinating. That is the difference between WW2 and all other modern conflicts.

[sethypooh21]

I'll definitely be watching this.

I think the Civil War and WWII get much more documentary love simply because there is more instantly interesting stuff. Both wars were "about" something (and, at least in the case of the Civil War, about multiple things, giving us the great Shelby Foote-Barbara Fields back and forth in Burns' series), and the actual wars were fairly dynamic.

WWI wasn't really about anything beyond the last lines of dynasties deciding to have a war,* and in the war itself nothing really happened except for people standing in place and dying from either disease or machine gun fire. I mean, John Keegan can't even hold my attention WRT WWI, and he's probably the most accessible military historian of modern times.


* There's probably a lot of interesting things to be said about the effects of that war on discrediting imperial succession and so on, but that seems like a bigger task than a series on WWI can adequately deal with

[Blarg]

I think part of the essence of war is its crazyness and frequent futility, and if anything was ever more futile than simply running into machine gun fire over a war people felt more obligated than inspired to fight, I don't know what it is. An entire generation in Britain was hit first by WW1 and then by the killer flu in quick succession and virtually wiped out. A punitive treaty was established that served to do nothing so much as guarantee the next war. WW1's complex politics, futile striving, and pitiless butchery might even have had the effect of turning heads enough that the Soviet and eventually Chinese revolutions seemed like worthwhile escapes from the ideas of a viciously bungled, socially stultified, incompetent past. It was pretty huge. Much of the drama of WW2 comes from the fact that it was a war worth fighting. Equally dramatic, to me, is how monstruous it is to fight a massive mechanized war that was not worth fighting, and then to learn so little from that as to make the next war inevitable. The moral drama, to me, seems much greater in the latter kind of war and is a big part of its fascination.

[sethypooh21]

I don't disagree with any of that Blarg. But the fact that nothing really happened, in a strategic sense, for vast periods of WWI, whereas WWII and the CW had so many more 'defining moments'.

WWII (and I'm missing tons):

Blitzkrieg
Pearl Harbor
North Africa
D-Day
Bulge
Guadalcanal
Midway
Hiroshima/Nagasaki

CW (again, missing tons):

John Brown
Fort Sumpter
Manasas
Antietam
Emancipation
Shiloh
Gettysberg
Andersonville
Cold Harbor
Sherman's March
The Blockade
Appomattox

I just don't think that Verdun and the Somme represent dramatic pivots in the same way.